By SARA FISHER
Staff Reporter
The image of a hand making the “OK” signal, with index finger touching the thumb and other fingers extended, is a common sight on American Web sites. It is used to indicate when someone wants to move to the next screen.
The system works fine in the United States, but raises eyebrows in some Asian and Latin American countries. There, the familiar OK sign is a profane gesture.
This faux pas is more than embarrassing for a company; it can be costly. As technology companies vie to corner foreign markets, they have to adapt their software explicitly for different cultures.
Enter Bowne Global Solutions, a Los Angeles company that focuses on “localization,” the process of adapting a product both linguistically and culturally.
“Software companies know that they have to localize their products in order to have a global reach,” said Donald Plumley, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing. “Translation is only the first step. The next step is to reflect local culture, legal and regulatory norms and business customs so seamlessly that a foreign user doesn’t realize that the software wasn’t explicitly designed for him in the first place.”
According to Bowne, Microsoft Corp. earns 60 percent of its revenues from outside the United States. For software company Adobe Systems Inc., it’s 40 percent, and for Novell Inc. it’s 48 percent. With local markets becoming saturated with certain types of software, these companies depend on foreign markets to sustain revenue growth.
“Our company has over 10 percent of its business in Japan, and we undertake localization seriously,” said Joyce Giosso, manager of localization services for Ascend Communications Inc., an Alameda-based software company. “We spend 1 percent of our entire budget in localizing our software. Right now I’m spending over $1 million a year in localizing a single line of our products.”
Bowne Global, which is a unit of the venerable financial printer Bowne & Co. Inc., has more than 700 employees in 22 offices around the world. The company uses native-language and technology experts to translate and otherwise adapt software, manuals and Web sites for their home market. Bowne Global’s clients include the World Cup’s official Web sites, where interviews and news for soccer fans around the globe are translated. The company also has adapted search engine Infoseek into Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, German, Spanish and Swedish.
It also has localized Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia software into German and Spanish. The Encarta work was an extensive endeavor, with Bowne Global teams actually reworking and replacing the encyclopedia contents so they reflected local history and culture.
Localization services for technology companies are exploding as the economy becomes more global. In 1995, this service industry constituted a $1.3 billion market, according to London-based research company Ovum Ltd. It is expected to become a $6.3 billion market by 2000.
“The localization industry, which didn’t go beyond a cottage industry until only two years ago, has grown incredibly rapidly,” said Claudio Pinkus, president of Bowne Global. “This industry has quickly evolved in pace with tech businesses’ need to go global to maximize their products’ reach.”
Bowne Global has kept up through an aggressive acquisition strategy. Last week, it announced its purchase of NorthWord A/S, a Copenhagen-based company that specializes in localizing computer and Internet products for Scandinavia. That comes on the heels of the purchase of two Japanese companies: Datalink Co. of Yokohama, which adapted Lotus Notes, and Technical Core Co. of Tokyo, which adapted Windows 95 for Japan.
Pinkus said Bowne Global’s growth will be driven by acquisitions rather than internal growth.
“It is most appropriate to acquire localization companies to establish a presence in a country than to build from scratch,” Pinkus said. “We get not just the talent, but also the existing relationships and a business model that had been working quite well.”
Adobe Systems turned to Bowne Global to localize Web sites that provide customer support for Adobe products. Kate Oliver, marketing program manager for Adobe, said the company is aggressively working to increase its penetration of Latin America and Asia. In that pursuit, it recently launched several sites in Korean and in Portuguese (for Brazil) and it has two sites pending for China, one in Mandarin and one in Cantonese.
“We had to strategize how best to get our sites up and around the world,” Oliver said. “There is a lot at stake, and Bowne has made a terrific contribution in what turned out to be an enormous task.”
The next challenge is to extend its core business. The company has developed a software program, due to launch this fall, which translates documents into various languages. Several translation programs are already being marketed by other companies, but they have been met with mixed critical reviews because idiomatic language continues to be a stumbling block.
“Creating this product has been a dream for a long time,” Pinkus said. “I hope that this software will further push Bowne to the forefront of localization.”
